When I delete even the smallest of files on windows xp the operation takes 3-10 minutes to complete.

I have read this can happen when the recycle bin has alot of items in it, and XP has to iterate through all the files. So I set the space usage to 1%, but even this does not help, the only thing that works is disabling the recycle bin which is not ideal.

I started encountering this on various XP machines of mine (both at home and at work). I think there was a windows update that triggered this problem, but I have no evidence, nor a solution.
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Matthew RustonJul 16 '09 at 16:48

I am getting something like this, even with a shift+del it is spending a long time "Preparing to delete"
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Jeremy FrenchAug 11 '09 at 11:26

10 Answers
10

Does the performance change based on your recycle bin being empty or full? Even at 1%, if you have a 500 GB drive that is still 5 gigabytes of files in your recycle bin, which can be a lot of files if they are typically pretty small files.

I find it works a lot better to remove files from the recycle bin based on how long they have been there, not size.

Anti-virus is another possibility. I have also seen other 3rd party tools that install themselves in place of the recycle bin. Check for that as well and try disabling them. If nothing else you could just start disabling all those applications running down in your system tray and see if that makes a difference.

The performance improves when its empty? Its a 200mb hd, either way I would expect windows to be design to handle this? There is an option to base the recycle bin on time?
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DanJul 16 '09 at 19:19

4

The recycle bin doesn't natively support time based emptying, but I believe CCleaner ( CCleaner.com ) can do that for you. It can configure it to only clear the recycle bin items older then a specific date and then set it to run on startup or even make a scheduled task for it.
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Jim McKeethJul 16 '09 at 20:39

200MB or 200GB? If it is 200MB, you are overdue for a upgrade.
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kmarshNov 17 '09 at 13:24

1

+1 I pressed the wrong button in Total Commander to delete Boost, so all 3141534 files ended up in the Recycle Bin. Deletes took 2+ seconds per file after that.
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György AndrasekNov 27 '10 at 15:17

There is a solution - I have deleted from the Recycle-Bin just 8 very big files totaling 1.5GB out of about 1.8GB total size of the Recycle-Bin, and then wall-la...deleting files is as fast as click - as I was used to before starting to encounter deleting files takes very long time.

I've run into the problem when the network wasn't working correctly. In this case it was due to delayed network access. The fix was to disconnect the network drives until I found the one(s) that were causing the problems.
Also, Windows has problems with file access when there are more than 10,000 files in any one folder.

Just going this myself right now. I have not seen the word defrag mentioned yet so for future readers I throw that one out there. Chkdsk to see if there are issues and do a defrag if necessary / if it has been awhile since the last defrag.

If there are some files that you know you want to delete (i.e., you want to bypass the Recycle Bin and permanently delete them), you can select the files, then press Shift+Del or hold Shift while you right-click and delete.

This allows you to selectively bypass the overhead of using the Recycle Bin without completely disabling it.